Arctic Easter egg hunt on the Arctic Ocean at Cambridge Bay. CBC photo.
This Easter egg hunt on the frozen Arctic Ocean at Cambridge Bay, Nunavut will make all other egg hunts across the Earth pale in comparison. What a way for the kids to celebrate Easter! I’m sure there were many polar bear monitors around as well!
Mario Tama photographed these breathless Arctic photos from a Lockheed P-3 accompanying a NASA crew carrying out Operation Icebridge, an operation initiated to measure Earth’s glaciers and ice sheets. The stillness, colors and textures of the Arctic landscape left Tama speechless.
“It’s such an unexpected landscape,” he says. “It felt like we were flying over a different planet.”
NASA spends 10 weeks each spring in the Arctic when the ice levels are at their highest using a pair of laser altimeters to record ice elevation and three types of radars to measure snow – one of which reaches 300 feet down to bedrock. Flying shifts of up to 12 hours, the crew surveyed hundreds of miles of coastline along Ellesmere Island in Canada and Greenland. While researchers focused on computer screens, Tama focused his camera on a landscape without scale.
“I was looking at shapes and features that I had never seen in my life,” Tama says. “We’d drop through the clouds or take a turn into a valley, and I’d be sitting there trying to process, what am I looking at?”
Last year the National Snow and Ice Data Center NASA and operation IceBridge announced the lowest ice levels for the Arctic and Antarctic in the past 38 years.
“Changes in Arctic sea ice is seen as one of the primary indicators of climate change,” says Nathan Kurtz, project scientist for Operation IceBridge. “It’s been changing so rapidly—the Arctic has been changing and warming. What we’re trying to do is get a sense of what’s driving some of the bigger changes that we’re seeing.”
Tama’s stunning images remind us all of the majestic beauty of the north that is in jeopardy due to global warming!
Ellesmere Island ice field. NASA photo.
Ice pack near Ellesmere Island. NASA photo.
Ice along the Baffin Island coast Greenland. NASA photo.
NASA avionics technician surveys the Arctic landscape. NASA photo.
Last week we posted news about the Doomsday Vault in Svalbard. The facility took in 50,000 new seeds for safe storage in the event of a catastrophe on Earth. Here is a fascinating video tour of the vault in the Arctic and how it all works! Enjoy!
This short video explains very succinctly how northern lights are formed. Hopefully this gives everyone a basic understanding of what is behind those amazing aurora borealis spectacles that glimmer across the northern skies above Churchill and other parts of the Earth. Enjoy!
This awesome video by adventure photographer Chris Burkard. Chris specializes in surfing footage from the harshest climates sporting the most grueling waves on Earth. On his recent trip to Iceland he and his crew endured an epic storm that produced some gnarly waves all under a magnificent light show of aurora borealis. Check the video out!